It was only at this point, after crossing the Indus and entering the 150 miles of sterile salt marshes separating Shikarpur from the Bolan Pass, that it seemed to have dawned on Macnaghten and his generals exactly what they had taken on: a campaign far from their own territory, through a hostile, parched and largely unmapped landscape, with only the most tenuous communications and guarded on all sides by unwilling and unreliable allies.
